This paper uses a psychological/computational theory of emotional coherence to explain several aspects of religious belief and practice. After reviewing evidence for the importance of emotion to religious thought and cognition in general, it describes psychological and social mechanisms of emotional cognition. These mechanisms are relevant to explaining the acquisition and maintenance of religi...

Introduction: The most important consequence of nephrogenic disease is the chronic renal failure and unfortunately, there is no significant program to improve the life quality of these patients. Although they need mental support as well as physical rehabilitation but all current endeavors focused on increasing their physical ability not the mental aspect. The aim of this study was to evaluat...

A well-replicated finding in the psychological literature is the negative correlation between religiosity and intelligence. However, several studies also conclude that one form of religiosity, church attendance, is protective against later-life cognitive decline. No effects of religious belief per se on cognitive decline have been found, potentially due to the restricted measures of belief used...

introduction: the most important consequence of nephrogenic disease is the chronic renal failure and unfortunately, there is no significant program to improve the life quality of these patients. although they need mental support as well as physical rehabilitation but all current endeavors focused on increasing their physical ability not the mental aspect. the aim of this study was to evaluate t...

BACKGROUND While religious faith remains one of the most significant features of human life, little is known about its relationship to ordinary belief at the level of the brain. Nor is it known whether religious believers and nonbelievers differ in how they evaluate statements of fact. Our lab previously has used functional neuroimaging to study belief as a general mode of cognition [1], and ot...

The present study examined the association between belief in life after death and six measures of psychiatric symptomology in a national sample of 1403 adult Americans. A statistically significant inverse relationship was found between belief in life after death and symptom severity on all six symptom clusters that were examined (i.e., anxiety, depression, obsession-compulsion, paranoia, phobia...

Recent evolutionary accounts seek to explain religious belief and behavior in terms of native cognitive dispositions and culturally transmitted innovations that have persisted because they have adaptive value. Despite the often vitriolic evolutionreligion debate, new evolutionary theories typically avoid challenging the truth of religious beliefs. In this paper we do three things. (1) We descri...

Don Cupitt’s version of religious non-realism based as it is on linguistic constructivism, radical relativism and the view that culture forms human nature has been attacked with devastating effect by realists in the last few years. I argue that there is another strand in Cupitt’s thinking, his biological naturalism, that supports a different version of religious non-realism and that he failed t...

We describe here a new measure of religious commitment, the Belief into Action (BIAC) scale. This measure was designed to be a comprehensive and sensitive measure of religious involvement that could discriminate individuals across the religious spectrum, and avoid the problem of ceiling effects that have haunted the study of highly-religious populations. Many scales assess religious beliefs, wh...